


Little Brown Man

by RiverK



Category: American Gods (TV), American Gods - Neil Gaiman, Philippine folklore
Genre: Agender Character, Coming to America - Freeform, Filipino diaspora, Folk Hero, Gen, Ifugao diety, Philippine mythology, Philippine-American History, Racism, St. Louis World's Fair, Trickster - Freeform, doesn't feature any of the American Gods characters, philippine folklore - Freeform, philippine folktales
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 16:57:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11317725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiverK/pseuds/RiverK
Summary: Juan Tamad came to America on a ship. He came to America with men hired to work in the sugarcane fields of Hawaii and the orchards and vineyards of California.





	Little Brown Man

Juan Tamad came to America on a ship. He came to America with men hired to work in the sugarcane fields of Hawaii and the orchards and vineyards of California.

Juan Tamad arrived and worked beside them, boys with eyes full of promises and hearts full of hope.

They spoke in the languages of seven thousand islands and clung to one another in the solitude of America’s endless tracts of brightness and unbroken earth.

With them, he bore the weight of disdain the Kano, the White Men, hefted on the boys’ backs, the hate that seethed in the Kano’s eyes for their brown skin and their wiry strength --their willingness to work in the fields they had scorned. English was a language that rested easy on Juan Tamad’s tropical tongue, but he found that the shape of his own languages refused to shift to accommodate its sounds. Still, Juan Tamad smiled and dipped his head and bowed with the boys he had accompanied, and they carried on with their work.

True to his name however, Juan Tamad, Juan the Lazy, avoided work when he could.

It didn’t matter. Things happened around him. That was how it was.

And so, somehow, the cane was cut and the grapes were picked, and over time, the boys full of promises became men full of longing, sleeping in their bunkhouses and whispering stories of monkeys and rice fields and monsoon to one another around lonely kerosene lamps.

He watched them dream of sweethearts back at home, of the dollars they would bring with them when the tide finally turned. He watched them fall in love with girls who had eyes like the ocean and skin paler than new-cooked rice, and he watched them get beaten for the audacity of the women’s reciprocation, beaten for their smiles and their kindness and their charm. Some were sent to prison for daring to love. Miscegenation, the Kano called it. As if changing its name could somehow turn something so simple and true into a sin against God.

Juan Tamad shook his head.

At least it wasn’t him.

Juan Tamad ran into Apo Manongan once. Manongan Creator. Manongan Destroyer. Manongan of the Dead. Now reduced to little more than a ghost decades after the St. Louis World’s Fair.

They stared mournfully at Juan Tamad, knowing that Juan Tamad was like them, but a lowlander, a creature all his own. And so Juan Tamad sat on the hard-packed earth and told them he would listen as they sang. Grapes and cotton and oranges and cane, they could all wait.

One listened when an elder spoke.

The Americans had taken members of different tribes of the Ifugao and put them on display amidst constructed huts and artificial palm trees and an alien sky in the World’s Fair. Spectators gaped at them as one would at an animal captured in the darkest jungle wilds. And the captives were told they would have to dance their dances and sing their songs.

The men and women --eleven in all, each dreaming of a different Manongan and speaking in a slightly different tongue, danced. They had had no choice.

To the ones who had organized the fair, it would show justification for America’s colonial rule: the acquisition of a nation with people too dark and small and savage --too _inferior_ \- to govern themselves. Never mind the Catholic, God-fearing Tagalog urbanely reading his newspaper and answering the spectators’ questions in the display next door. Never mind the smiling Visayan with his grass hat and his lilting English, thick and halting with glottal stops. No, the spectators would only remember the tribe of naked savages, the head hunters, banging on their brass gongs and dancing to their heathen god. And they would say Yes we cannot set these people free.

And so, back at home, seven thousand islands’ peoples remained captives of the Land of the Free.

And now the last of the Ifugao who had been put on display, who had danced his people’s dance for spectators aching to ease their own consciences for supporting America’s imperial ambitions, was a laborer in one of the very work camps where Juan Tamad stayed. Manongan told him that the man had bounced from World’s Fair to freak show to destitution in the streets, but he had still sung their name deep in his mountain-strong heart.

And Manongan stayed. There was nothing else they could do, now that they were here, there was no way they could return. That wasn’t the way of it.

Juan Tamad looked at them mournfully, at the wrinkles cut deep underneath their red and black rags. Manongan’s last worshiper was old, dying of fatigue and heartbreak and the water in his lungs. Neither he, nor Manongan were long for this world.

And so, against his own nature, Juan Tamad, trickster and fool, worked beside that last old man and waited, bearing witness until the man died, and the last traces of Manongan in America were finally, quietly, gone.

“No dogs or Filipinos allowed,” Read the signs outside shops and bars. Away from the close heat of one another’s company, the workers weren’t even granted the dignity of being seen as men. But even together, the men were lonely. They nursed their bruises and aching bones in cool night air, trading sips of rotgut and tales of Juan Tamad’s mischief around a kerosene flame.

And inside each burned a kernel of heat that ebbed and flowed for the tides of Home.

 

\- End -


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